Fashion Industry Statistics 1992-2014

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How the Collection Is Organized

Manufacturing comes first, because production leads the chain: the shipments series records the dollar value of what apparel manufacturers sold, and the inventories series records what they held, each running monthly from 1992 to 2014 in seasonally adjusted and not seasonally adjusted form. Retailing follows, with the clothing stores survey as the headline series and the men's, women's, shoe and jewelry store surveys breaking the shop-floor picture into its specialty parts — the same store types a high street is made of, tracked separately because their seasons and cycles differ. Wholesaling closes the chain: apparel, piece goods and notions move through merchant wholesalers whose monthly sales and inventory figures show the pipeline filling and draining between factory and retailer.

Every chart set carries its definitions and cautions with it. The retail definitions page explains the survey terms behind the retail series, and the wholesale definitions page does the same for the wholesale series, because a monthly figure means little until the reader knows what a shipment, an inventory or a seasonally adjusted estimate actually counts. The data behind all of the charts was retrieved from Census sources on February 4 and 5, 2015, and the charts are kept as historical reference for the 1992-2014 period: revisions to source data may occur at the Census Bureau, and these pages present the series as retrieved. Used together, the sets let a researcher trace one industry's two decades — through expansion, import competition and recession — in the government's own monthly measurements.

Reading Twenty-Two Years of Monthly Data

Monthly series reward patience: a single month's movement is mostly seasonal noise, which is why each chart set presents the seasonally adjusted view beside the unadjusted record. The adjusted series answers the research question — is the industry growing or shrinking underneath its calendar? — while the unadjusted series preserves the calendar itself, the December peaks and January troughs that govern apparel working capital. Comparing the manufacturing, retail and wholesale sets for the same period shows the chain's timing: wholesale inventories move before retail sales, and manufacturers' shipments lead both, which is what makes the three groups one collection rather than three separate curiosities.